Working in secret, a small team of researchers from GNAA's Goatse Security research group quietly and diligently took steps that lead to the eventual collapse of LulzSec's management and infrastructure.

"It was quite simple.", GoatSec Researcher "h" said, "Once we discovered where all the real action was, it was clear that the FBI and every other government entity were on the wrong track."

The track they'd been on, was a public IRC channel on the now-defunct network, irc.encyclopediadramatica.ch. Run by convicted autist Ryan Cleary, the network was easily taken over by a team of international law enforcement, for whom a bedroom-dwelling teenager was no match.

"The old network was a ruse, plain and simple. By generating the publicity that they did, hundreds of potential suspects flocked to their public channel, all the while diverting the attention of law enforcement from their actual place of discussion", "h" explained.

It turns out, however, that as public as their "gimmick" channel was, their real channel was even moreso, as Goatse Security researchers learned.

"LulzSec's members couldn't hack their way out of a wet paper sack," said Goatse member "Rucas". "They were using two-year old public exploits on machines that nobody cared about or maintained. Once one of their members connected to an IRC network that allowed us to view the IP address of his compromised host, it was simple to spy on the user, by using the same hole they'd used to initially compromise the machine. What we found shocked us."

What the team found was shocking, indeed. Run by David J. Moore, also known as kunwon1, LulzSec members were using the IRC channel ##politics on irc.freenode.net as their virtual hideout. Originally founded as a chatroom for Moore to assert superiority by banning people he disagreed with, ##politics was recently revamped as a meeting-ground for cybercriminals, when Moore was approched by Jason Gates, also known as bikcmp.

Gates acted as an intermediary for the LulzSec group, and paid Moore a sum of 100BTC to allow the use of ##politics to discuss their criminal activity. Being equivalent to Moore's yearly income on state-paid unemployment, this was an opportunity he could not refuse.

With access to machines used by LulzSec to conduct their criminal activity, and the knowledge of who used them, it was easy for GoatSec researchers to infiltrate the group and gather as many details as possible about the group, their members, and their activities. GoatSec then forwarded this information to Lee Vartan, AUSA, as well as FBI Special Agent Christian Schorle.

"We cannot, and WILL not allow these teenage virgins to subvert American institutions and infrastructure", "Rucas" wrote, "Just because you can run a script that someone much smarter than you wrote two years ago, does not make you an e-Che Guevara."